NeoAxis Engine Supports In-Game 3D Web Browsing

I get the feeling that this news story is going to be linked to quite a few projects in the near future. But NeoAxis Group, a middleware and development tools group, announced today that their game engine NeoAxis now supports the Awesomium windowless framework. In plain terms, it means that developers can implement web browsing directly into a game through the NeoAxis engine.

Based on the Chromium WebKit engine, the Awesomium framework enables developers to add all sorts of snazzy web material into their projects. As a more corporeal example, something like Call of Duty: Elite or Battlefield 3’s Battlelog would no longer appear in separate windows, but you could track stats, get instant updates or browse through clan information directly from within the game itself using the built-in browser.

To give yet another example of how these tools can be used for projects (and no doubt, I’m sure we’ll be seeing this stuff implemented into big-budget games with always-on DRM very soon) the press release states that…

NeoAxis and Awesomium integrations provides unique opportunities for game development and new, interesting game design ideas implementations. One of the NeoAxis features — ability to create in-game 3D interfaces — can be effectively used with this framework. Now developers can display online web pages content or local HTML files right inside their games — for example, at the screen of virtual monitor or control terminal.

Yeah so you know how in GTA IV you could surf a “virtual” version of the web? Well, in GTA V it just might be a real web browser next time. The tools are also free for indie and start-up developers, so this is definitely something small teams will want to take advantage of.

You can check out a list of some of the features for the NeoAxis engine and Awesomium below. For more information feel free to visit the Official Website.